Guitarists, Are You Making These 5 Tone Mistakes?

1) Too Much Echo/Distortion

This one’s easy. But everyone does it for at least a little while. Everyone. Most people move on after talks with producers, sound guys, trusted audience members, or band mates. Simply put, when you play live, you need a good deal less gain and reverb/delay than you think you do. This has to do with the other instruments, the mix, and the venue. Everything is louder and fuller than in your practice room. Nuance definitely still has its place, but the end result you get from using various effects will be fairly different when you’re on a stage. Side note: in my opinion setting dirt pedals and echo effects to be slightly more subtle on their own, then stacking them (i.e. using two or more at the same time) for more extreme settings produces more pleasing and interesting tones. And yes, stacking reverbs and stacking delays is a thing, and it’s awesome!

 
For starters, The massive amounts of gain that can sound so brutal and awesome will usually turn to mud and bury your guitar once the bass and drums - especially cymbals - kick in. Bump your volume up ever so slightly louder than your clean tone. My usual rule is about half a notch for each level of extra gain - 0.5 for medium gain OD, 1 for high gain OD, 1.5 for fuzz - give or take a little. Now dial out 10-20% of the gain you think sounds good at home. Your chords will be a lot more distinct when you do.

 
Now let’s set those echoes. Reverb is easy enough. Dial in the amount of reverb you think sounds good. Now turn it down at least one notch, two if you’re a reverb fiend. Delays typically have two main controls that determine how they react with your signal: feedback (how many echoes you hear) and mix (how loud the echoes are compared to your non-affected or dry signal). Usually when one of these two controls goes up, the other goes down. There are three main types of delay: tape, digital, and analog. While these all can sound good in different roles, their differences tend to make them stronger for certain sounds, which determines how you should balance the feedback and mix controls.

 
Tape delay and digital delay produce fairly clear, percussive repeats. If you want bouncy delay, this is it. But if there are too many echoes your playing sounds messy, and if the echoes aren’t loud enough, you lose that bounce. That’s why on these delays I like a short feedback and a high mix. Analog delays are usually the legendary beasts behind those super ambient swells and drones you hear. You want long feedback, but a high mix washes out your playing. The result is that all your playing sits behind the band rather than that nice pad you want. So for analog, turn the feedback all the way up and bring it down until it’s relatively tame, then turn the mix all the way down and bring it up just until you can barely hear it with the rest of the band.

3) Effect Dependence

The Edge is a pretty cool dude. You may or may not have seen one of his videos showing what his parts sound like without effects. They are up there with the most minimal of minimalism. I’m sure you’re cool, too, but you’re not The Edge. Unless you’ve also risen to rock’n’roll superstar status and joined the Hall of Fame while writing lead parts with single-digit note counts, you should probably consider his approach the exception rather than the rule. Minimalism is indeed a beautiful thing. Less is more, and that applies to effects at times as well. If your part doesn’t sound good without any effects, there’s a pretty decent chance that adding a bunch of dirt, modulation, delay, etc. won’t make it sound extraordinary.

5) Pigeonholing Effect Types

This last mistake might not directly affect how good you sound, but you’ll definitely be missing out on some awesome tones. It’s easy to get a particular sound from any given effect and permanently attach it to the effect making it. Many guys only think about percussive dotted eighths or over-the-top solos whenever someone mentions delay. Many people only picture fuzz as this weird untamable beast. Overdrive easily becomes “vanilla” rather than inspiring. Then, if you let it, it happens. You hear a guitar part, and you wonder what type of sorcery that player is using to make THAT sound. It could be reverse reverb, bandpass delays, overdrive from a torn speaker, or any of a wide variety of new applications for traditional effects. Suddenly that old, tired tonal palette is new again.

 
Get to know different effects. Listen to new bands and styles. For me, it started with chorus. I never dreamed of using chorus - ever. It was that weird swirly effect from hair metal and grunge. Then I did some double-tracking on guitar parts in the studio. Now, chorus is indispensable to my sound in 3- or 4-piece bands. Next was compressor. “It kills my dynamics.” “It’s only for country.” Wrong again. Now it’s always on. Then it happened with tremolo. Then loopers. And again with filters. I heard a song not too long ago that made me think “That phaser sounds absolutely killer on that part!” I generally think phasers sound awful. Wrong yet again.

 
The moment you limit an effect to one sound or one style, you lose the potential to create a unique tone with it. Experiment with different settings. Try different placements in your signal chain. Break every “rule” at least once. Even the ones I’ve written here. Though it’s probably best to do so during your private practice time. Keep whatever is beneficial enough to justify the trade-off of not doing it the other way.